Wednesday, February 26, 2014

'The page is a touching'

The touch screen - the screen where I come in contact with the outside runs deep. The depth beyond the touch far exceeds an
imagination of what an infinity can be. To imagine an infinite world all within
your touch. Possibilities that exist only through the mind and
implode silently. With each swipe, touch,
tap and pinch.

‘The page is a touching, of my hand while it writes and your
hands while they hold the book. This touch is infinitely indirect, deferred,
but it continues as a slight, resistant, fine texture, the infinitesimal dust
of a contact everywhere interrupted and pursued. In the end, here and now, your
own gaze touches the same traces of characters as mine and you read me and I
write you.

If I write I create sense-effects. I displace myself from
bodies. Exscription passes through writing and so we have to write from a place,
a body that we neither have nor are.’

Dancing is writing, writing in space, making space within
the opaque, hollowing it out so the inside and outside are no longer apart. The
inside-outing of an intestinal desire. Akka Mahadevi wraps herself in silk rays from the
sun, Krishna opens his mouth to show his mother an entire cosmos. The eye is
the crack whose infinite darkness saves brightness from staining - a suction
pump that deletes and erases all temporary files from Random Access Memories.

A sincere body, acting behaving, dancing and imitating everyday
touches sincerely the ground it walks, tumbles and crawls upon. Writing about
the dead owl outside our house and its passing makes the owl die two times over. Thriving on the ink and paper or the incandescent glow of the laptop
screen and its flickering letters, the white feathers reappear on the grey
belly of the owl, electrocuted by the electric pole by the street outside our
house.

A body is perhaps made by its documentary. It lives, it dies, it breathes when it has been written in the world of others. A lone human on
the planet might as well be a plant or an insect or the wind?

‘But it was in vain that I lingered beside the hawthorns –
breathing in their invisible and unchanging odour, trying to fix it in my mind,
losing it, recapturing it, absorbing myself in the rhythm which disposed the
flowers here and there with a youthful light-heartedness , and at intervals as
unexpected as certain intervals in music – they went on offering the same charm
in inexhaustible profusion but without letting me delve any more deeply, like
those melodies which one can play a hundred times in succession without coming
any nearer to their secret.

I turned away from them for a moment so as to be able to
return to them afresh.’